1. Field of the Invention (Technical Field)
The presently claimed invention relates to motor vehicles and more particularly to vehicles with interchangeable modular payloads specifically designed for emergency response and military applications.
2. Background Art
When an emergency response agency wants to expand capabilities it normally needs to invest large amounts of their budget to acquire specialized equipment, such as vehicles to provide a specific type of service. To avoid this costly alternative, vehicles with removable payloads are being used. This provides a single vehicle with varying types of modular payloads for particular uses. There are several prior art modular vehicles. Some of these include US Patent Application Pub. No. U.S. 2008/0017426 A1 which describes a modular vehicle system for configuring the core of the vehicle as desired by exchanging modules. Another prior art device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,829,946 which describes a system for exchanging a chassis mounted truck body or modular container for refuse trucks. These prior art systems are very rudimentary in positioning and locking the modular payload system on the vehicle. With our vehicle being a high dollar piece of equipment, it can be limited to a single purchase and funds can be directed to expanding the RDM variants that are much more affordable. All this combined makes a versatile and economical piece of equipment
The problem itself starts with the lack of availability of versatile designs on the market. The majority of designs used today are very expensive and are usually sole purpose vehicles. The function being performed today is in the form of military vehicles but only the modular aspect of the design. Previous designs have been geared towards modularity in military vehicles. The systems are specifically for the vehicles weapon system and operator compartment and allows the primary weapon of the vehicle to be converted as well as operator cabin seating configuration. These designs convert the entire vehicle including the body, cabin and the operating systems.
Previous designs are very specific requiring lengthy training for the operation of the vehicle. The area that seems most problematic is the complexity of the conversion process. This process requires a specialized garage for conversion as well as heavy equipment to lift the conversion modules. This entire process is time consuming by a crew of trained operators and eliminates the possibility of conversion in the field by the vehicle operators themselves. The first problem these designs encounter is that they are very expensive both to the consumer and for production, limiting the availability to emergency response agencies. The second problem these designs fail to solve is the ability to stock multiple conversion modules due to the complexity of the designs, meaning the modules would be at headquarters awaiting conversion instead of the mobilization area where they are needed during actual operations